In the study of geometric objects that arise naturally, the main tools are either groups or equations. In the rst case, powerful algebraic methods are available and enable one to solve many deep problems. While algebraic methods are still important in the second case, analytic methods play a dominant role, especially when the dening equations are transcendental. Indeed, even in the situation where the geometric object is homogeneous or algebraic, analytic methods often lead to important contributions. In this talk, we shall discuss a class of problems in differential geometry and the analytic methods that are involved in solving such problems.

We study three-dimensional Riemannian manifolds with nonnegative scalar curvature. We find new topological obstruction for such manifolds. Our method turns out to be useful in studying the positive mass conjecture in general relativity.

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This paper develops a novel computational technique to define and construct manifold splines with only one singular point by employing the rigorous mathematical theory of Ricci flow. The central idea and new computational paradigm of manifold splines are to systematically extend the algorithmic pipeline of spline surface construction from any planar domain to an arbitrary topology. As a result, manifold splines can unify planar spline representations as their special cases. Despite its earlier success, the existing manifold spline framework is plagued by the topology-dependent, large number of singular points (ie,| 2 g 2| for any genus-g surface), where the analysis of surface behaviors such as continuity remains extremely difficult. The unique theoretical contribution of this paper is that we devise new mathematical tools so that manifold splines can now be constructed with only one singular point, reaching their

In this paper we develop methods to extend the minimal hypersurface approach to positive scalar curvature problems to all dimensions. This includes a proof of the positive mass theorem in all dimensions without a spin assumption. It also includes statements about the structure of compact manifolds of positive scalar curvature extending the work of\cite {sy1} to all dimensions. The technical work in this paper is to construct minimal slicings and associated weight functions in the presence of small singular sets and to show that the singular sets do not become too large in the lower dimensional slices. It is shown that the singular set in any slice is a closed set with Hausdorff codimension at least three. In particular for arguments which involve slicing down to dimension 1 or 1 the method is successful. The arguments can be viewed as an extension of the minimal hypersurface regularity theory to this setting of minimal slicings.